A theory of everything (else) | Jacques Vallée | TEDxBrussels

As soon as you talk about matter and energy, you have to write down the laws that govern matter and energy, but information seems to require fewer assumptions. In the age of computer revolution, it is not a big leap to say that everything can be expressed in information. Jacques Vallee gives us an insight of the limits of physics and introduces us to the theory of information and how it is related to time and coincidences in our lives.

Dr. Vallee was born in France, where he received a B.S. in mathematics at the Sorbonne and an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University. Coming to the U.S. as an astronomer at the University of Texas, where he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA, Jacques later moved to Northwestern University where he received his PhD in computer science. He went on to work at SRI International and the Institute for the Future, where he directed the "Forum" project to build the world's first network-based collaboration system as a Principal Investigator for DARPA. Venture capitalist since 1987, Jacques Vallée has served as an early-stage investor and director of over 60 high-technology companies. Apart from his work with information science and finance, Jacques has had a long-term private interest in astronomy, in writing (as an author of several books, including science-fiction novels) and in unidentified aerial phenomena.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Thank you very much.
It's wonderful to be back in Brussels.

I have been given the challenge
of discussing with you

the next 50 years of physics,

in a dark room without windows,
an hour after lunch.

So, I already see some of you
recoiling in horror

at the prospect of equations
and tensor calculus.

I'm not going to do that.

I've called my presentation
"A theory of everything (else)."

Professional physicists today

are developing
various theories of everything

to try to reconcile the two major
successful theories of physics today:

general relativity and quantum mechanics.

There are a couple of dirty little secrets
in there that they are not telling you.

The first one is that these two theories,

which each of which
works very well in its own domain,

are in violent contradiction
in most of our world every day,

especially with gravity.

Therefore, the idea is to try
to develop theories of everything

that would reconcile somehow -
like string theory and others -

would reconcile these two
dominant views of physics.

The other dirty little secret
is that in all that,

we have left out a missing child.

The missing child
is the little sister of physics.

It's the physics of information,

and that's what I would like
to talk about this afternoon.

The physics they teach us
in college and in universities

is the physics of energy.

It has to do with lasers
and colors and particles and mass

and fields - whatever the field is -

and acceleration and inertia

and all these things
that you've been exposed to

in high school or college or university.

The problem is that they also teach us

that information and energy
are two sides of the same coin,

but they never bothered
to teach us the physics of information;

they continue to teach us
the physics of energy.

Now, going back to the 19th century,

James Maxwell,

discussing thermodynamics,

took a very simple idea

that if you pour hot liquid
into a cold liquid,

there will be an average
temperature of the liquid

between these two components.

The only way to stop that
would be for a little demon,

Maxwell's demon,

to be there and to separate
these molecules.

But absent this demon,

the law of thermodynamics
will say the two liquids will mix

and will reach
an average tepid temperature.

Leo Szilard, who was
a colleague of Einstein, in 1929,

went one step further and said
for the demon to be able to do this,

the demon needs information

about which molecules are hot
and which molecules are cold.

If the demon knows that,

then the demon can, in fact,
keep the two liquids separated,

and, well, they will never reach
an average temperature.

But that means that there is
just as much information

as there is energy in the system,

and that information and energy are,
in fact, the two sides of the same coin.

So, where's the missing sister of physics?

Physics of energy has to do, again,

with particles and atoms
and fundamental forces

and mass and entropy and fields

and space dimensions - X, Y and Z -

and T - for time -

and momentum and inertia
and speed and so on ...

But we never talk about similar concepts
on the side of the physics of information,

and my argument is that
in the next 50 years, we will.

I should disclose to you ...

I'm in a field where everybody
works on full disclosure,

so I may as well confess to you
that I dropped out of physics.

I have an advanced degree in physics
only because I was good in math,

so I could work out the equations
and get the answer.

But then, I dropped out of it
for a couple of reasons.

First, I could never understand
what they meant

when they said time was a dimension.

They say, "Okay, there is X, Y and Z,"
so I get that from common experience.

And they say, "Think of time
in the same way; only in the equation,

you put a little "I" in front of "T"
for square root of minus 1 -

but don't think about that -

and then you treat it the same way,
and everything works fine."

That's in general relativity
and other areas of physics -

that's what you do.

I could never get that because in X,
I can go this way or I can go that way.

In time, I cannot -
I'm not allowed to do that.

So, we're very good at talking
about how time passes;

we don't know why time passes.

Similarly, we're very good
at talking about how things fall down;

we don't know why they fall down.

And again, this is not something
you've been taught in physics in college.

They never said that they
couldn't explain those two things.

The third thing that disgusted
me was particles.

You know, we have particles
inside the atoms,

and then, we have particles
inside the particles;

we have particles inside electrons
and photons and everything else.

And then, since it still
doesn't quite work very well,

we have particles of sub-particles.

And that reminds me of something

that happened to astronomy
in the Middle Ages,

when they had cycles and epicycles,
and epicycles of epicycles.

If you keep doing that,
everything works fine,

except that that's not
the way reality works.

So I thought they should go on doing this;

they should go on
with the physics of energy.

We achieve wonderful things
with that science,

but that's not what I really want to do.

So I went back looking
for the missing little sister of physics,

and it turns out it's asking
fundamental questions

about the nature of time

and also about some
of the things that happen in our lives,

like coincidences.

On July 20, 1996,

we had a house in the country,
north of San Francisco,

a wonderful area full redwoods,

and we had some friends
over on an evening, for dinner.

One of our friends was a woman

who said she was going
to be in a play, in Mendocino County,

and in the play, she was going
to read something in French.

She had not practiced French for a while,

so she asked us
if we had a book in French,

and we had a bookshelf
with English and French books.

So my wife pulled out a novel,

which was this novel by René Barjavel,
"La peau de César,"

and she gave it to me,
and I opened it at a random page.

I read a passage at random, which was

"I was in the Boeing that blew up
after take-off at Kennedy Airport,

a bomb in the hold, 132 dead, remember?"

Well, this was three days after a Boeing
took off from Kennedy Airport

and blew up over the Atlantic,

and we were shocked by this.

If you talk about this kind
of coincidence with your friends,

you'll find that many people have,
in fact, had that kind of experience.

This was not precognition;

this was three days
after the TWA 800 accident.

But it shook us up and then we forgot it.

This is the kind of thing that you
sort of brush out of your awareness.

Some scientists have thought
deeply about this.

Going back to the Middle Ages,
Facius Cardan, in the 15th century,

writes in his diary
that he had performed some rites

to make the elementals of the air
appear in his laboratory.

This was a very fashionable thing
to do in the 15th century,

and these creatures appeared before him.

There were seven sylphs,
the creatures of the air.

Two of them were the chiefs,
and they came forward,

and he asked them what they knew
about the nature of the universe.

It turned out the two sylphs disagreed.

One of them said,

"Well, God created the universe
once and for all, and here we are."

The other one said, "No. God created
the universe from moment to moment,

and if He should stop for a minute,
everything would disappear."

So this clicker is not the clicker
that I was given earlier.

It's another occasion,
another instance of the same clicker,

but these clickers are being generated
by something in a higher plane,

which as a software engineer,
I understand perfectly; this makes sense.

It makes no sense in terms
of the physics of energy;

it makes perfect sense
in the physics of information,

and here you have
the two models of the world.

You have the classic physical model,
and you have quantum mechanics.

A number of people
have more recently been looking

for the little sister of physics,

starting with Wolfgang Pauli,
one of the founders of quantum mechanics,

Carl Jung - and there is extensive
correspondence between Pauli and Jung -

Paul Kammerer, Arthur Koestler,
David Bohm, Max Velmans,

Philippe Guillemant in France, Landauer
and Seth Lloyd and many others.

Carl Jung argued with Pauli,

and Carl Jung compiled a catalog
of coincidences that had happened to him.

In one case, he was
at a conference in another city,

and in the middle of the night,

he woke up with a feeling
there was somebody in the room.

He actually got up and checked,
and there was nobody in the vicinity,

but he had the feeling
of something hitting his forehead

and something hitting
the back of his head.

He went back to sleep,
and the next day he got a telegram

that one of his patients
had committed suicide

by shooting himself in the forehead,

and the bullet had lodged itself
in the back of the head.

Carl Jung, in his books, mentions
a number of these remarkable coincidences.

I had another occasion like this.

In the 70's, I was concerned
about the number of cults

growing up in California
but also in France and elsewhere

around the idea of extraterrestrials.

Some of these groups call themselves
the Melchizedek cult.

They use as inspiration
the biblical figure of Melchizedek.

This is a representation of Melchizedek
at Chartres Cathedral,

which is very beautiful.

Melchizedek is a very
interesting, very mystical,

very mysterious figure in the Bible.

He is a very powerful figure
because he initiated Abraham

and actually was the origin
of all three religions of the book:

the Islamist, the Jewish
and the Christian religion.

I was going to an interview
in Los Angeles,

took a taxi at random
from the flow of traffic,

got to my interview.

When I got home, I looked
at the receipt from the driver,

and the receipt was signed Melchizedek.

Now, that got me

on a strange series of thoughts.

At the time,

there was research going on
at Stanford Research Institute,

on parapsychology.

I was part of that program,
the program of remote viewing.

Uri Geller was there.

Uri Geller thought that he could
communicate with extraterrestrials

on board a platform called "Hoover,"

and that he was getting
communications from them,

which enabled him to do what
he was performing in our laboratory.

I thought, "Well, this seems
to be the same kind of communication.

Something is communicating with me."

Over the next several weeks,
I did a number of experiments,

and I convinced myself
that these coincidences,

some of them mean
something powerful, as Jung said.

Others mean absolutely nothing.

It's just the way the world is organized.

So let's go back and do
a little bit of software thinking.

If you have a small library ...

This is the Library of Congress,
33 million books.

Thirty-three million books is nothing.

I mean, that's what Facebook
does in one afternoon.

Today, Google is getting
35 hours of video per minute

uploaded to the YouTube site.

So, if you have a small library,
you can still work with coordinates.

You have shelves,
and you have vertical stacks,

and so you have X, Y and Z,
and that works fine.

If somebody sends you 10,000 books,

you can push the existing books
a little to insert the new books.

If you have enough staff people
at your disposal, it works fine.

If you have a modern library
which looks like this -

this is Google, Facebook, Twitter -

you can't do that anymore,
you can't use dimensions.

You sprinkle the information
that comes in, statistically,

in virtual memory,
in an infinite virtual memory.

Then you have a hashing code

that enables you to get it back when
somebody asks a question out to Google.

The result is statistical.

Some of it means something;
some of it means nothing.

This is now starting
to be mainstream physics.

Dr. Guillemant in France
is a CNRS physicist,

and in his latest book, "La route
du temps" - "The Road of Time" -

he argues that synchronicities
are caused by a double causality:

our intentions cause effects in the future

that become the future causes
of present effects.

Again, this is now becoming
mainstream physics.

To conclude, there are four requirements
for the new physics of 2061.

First, we should recognize the universe

as a sub-system of a mental reality
of information structures.

It's all information structure,
and it's all simultaneous.

I don't mean it's a database.

I don't mean to use analogs
with current, crude technology.

It's something obviously much bigger,
much more complex, but you get the idea.

We should recognize dimensions
as a cultural artifact.

We create dimensions

because we have small libraries
and we need X, Y and Z.

But we don't need them in physics,

so we should do away
with the concept of dimensions

in the physics of the future.

The present is over-determined.

As Guillemant says,

it is determined from the past
and it is determined from the future.

And finally, consciousness is generating
the impression of space and time.

That's what space-time is.

It is consciousness traversing
associations in this world of information

and creating the illusion
of space and time.

So, my proposal to you

is that we let physicists
continue with the physics of energy.

They do that very well
and will eventually have a way

of reconciling relativity
with quantum mechanics.

Let's go on and look
for the missing sister.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)